With a background in economics and public policy, I've covered domestic and international energy issues since 1998. I'm the editor-in-chief for Public Utilities Fortnightly, which is a paid subscription-based magazine that was established in 1929. My column, which also appears in the CSMonitor, has twice been named Best Online Column by two different media organizations. Twitter: @Ken_Silverstein. Email: ken@silversteineditorial.com

Where On Earth Do We Put Spent Nuclear Fuel?

If Nevada’s Harry Reid is right and Yucca Mountain is flattened, then what will happen to the nation’s 70,000-plus tons of nuclear waste? The Senate Majority Leader is adamant that such spent fuel from the country’s 102 nuclear plants will never find a permanent home in that area that is 90 miles outside of Las Vegas.

English: One wagon of a nuclear waste flask train being hauled through Bristol Temple Meads railway station by Direct Rail Services Class 37 diesel locomotives 37612 and 37069 en-route from Hinkley Point Power Station to Sellafield. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What are the other options? Multiple choices exist, say experts, who are pointing foremost to “reprocessing” that is used in France and Japan and which separates the uranium and plutonium from the rest of the nuclear waste. Under such scenarios, nuclear operators are able to get between 20-30 percent more use from the uranium, re-cycling those remains through nuclear reactors.

Electricite de France and ArevaAreva, for example, reprocess irradiated fuel and about 17 percent of France’s electricity is recycled from such nuclear waste. Kansai Electric PowerKansai Electric Power Co. in Japan, meanwhile, just received a shipment of reprocessed nuclear fuel from France. Both countries use a blending of uranium and plutonium, or MOX. That is an alternative to low-enriched uranium.

Reprocessing has been around since World War II when this country first developed nuclear reactors to produce plutonium — for the sole purpose of making weapons. In 1976 and under President Ford, the United States abandoned the practice, fearing that it could lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and particularly since India had the potential of making such weapons. A few years later, President Carter banned reprocessing altogether. And while President Reagan set aside the ban, neither his administration nor any since then have provided the funding to get it restarted.

But if a permanent burial site at Yucca Mountain never comes to pass, then the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel should be given consideration. After all, much of the globe is focused on mitigating the effects of climate change while also working to become energy independent. Meantime, 6.5 billion people exist but by 2050, that number is expected to be 9.2 billion. By the time that developing countries electrify, the need for energy will double or triple.

“Most of the stuff coming out coming out of nuclear plants is slightly enriched,” says Jim Cotter, head of Tidd Energy outside of Boston, which is a nuclear energy consulting firm. “It would take a lot to bring that up to weapons-grade material, which is around 90 percent enriched. Therefore, you could reprocess it without worrying about proliferation issues.”

Right now, the used fuel rods are cooled in pools for up to five years before they are stored in above-ground concrete-encased barrels. That was to be a temporary solution until a permanent storage site was found. Yucca Mountain was picked in 1987 and $12 billion later, engineers have been unable to prove that water would not leach into the burial site. That has forced designers to keep developing new barriers that have made the project cost-prohibitive.

All that is pushing reprocessing back into the limelight. But the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board studying the idea has said that its future use is “uncertain” here and it emphasizes that while reprocessing may reduce nuclear waste, the process does not eliminate it.

However, better options exist, says Jim Conca, director of the Center for Laboratory Sciences for RJLee Group in Pasco, Wash. Consider: the U.S. Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Program (WIPP), a massive salt formation in southeastern New Mexico that has been accepting waste from nuclear weapons for 14 years. But it is not permitted to take in low-level spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors.

As Conca explains, WIPP is 16 square miles of a 10,000-square mile, 2,000-foot thick salt layer. Those materials that are placed there are engulfed by the natural geology — the tightest rock on earth. The main obstacle, he adds, is the administrative changes necessary to allow the transport and disposal of spent fuel from the current interim sites to WIPP. Political resistance would also arise.

But massive salt formations are better repositories than the hard rock at Yucca Mountain, he insists, noting that rocks can fracture whereas salt does not. The best salt formations are in New Mexico and Texas.

Conca agrees that taking reprocessed nuclear fuel and using it in a nuclear power plant is less difficult than applying the same material to an atomic weapon. But WIPP changes the equation, he says, noting that, “there is so much uranium in the world that we don’t need to reprocess it. Mining the uranium is so much easier and so much cheaper than reprocessing it.”

In a more futuristic scenario, Fourth Generation nuclear reactors such as the one being designed by TerraPower, will be able to burn spent fuel.

Legally, Yucca Mountain remains a live topic but politically, it stands little chance of becoming permanent repository, especially because the Senate Majority Leader represents Nevada. But that debate over what to do with spent nuclear fuel has spawned some compelling ideas, some of which have been around for a while.

Reconciling the reprocessing fissures is likely to take decades. But broadening the use of massive salt deposits such as WIPP to include not just weapons-grade material but also radioactive fuel from commercial reactors would be an easier gulf to bridge.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

We should also be checking out Molten Salt designs such as the WAMSR (Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor) and the LFTR (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor). Both greatly reduce the amount of long-lived Transuranic waste, with the LFTR creating NO transuranic waste. Both can be used to generate electricity or create a source of process heat.

Of course. This goes without saying. Just as the safest way to handle fire is not to light one. But one gets tired of cold beans after awhile. The point I am trying to make, without resorting to 30-second sound bites, is that the problem of nuclear waste is not only manageable, but solvable. Here – give this a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2M81SYQXjI

I’ve already suggested that the NRC offer a Million Dollar Prize for the best way to “solve” the nuclear waste storage problem” for the next 50 years, so please consider this idea as my “low cost” solution to America’s “long term” radioactive waste storage problem:

Make use of our Military Testing Bases and or our MOA’s (Military Operation Area’s) out west, which are really huge tracts of land (think tens of thousands of acres) used ONLY by the military and already secured by them 24/7!

Placing these very large (heavy) concrete casks in a poke-a-dot pattern will allow for at least 50 to 100 years of storage, safe from everything except a War, (in which case every reactor is just as vulnerable) and then revisit the storage problem then; at which time, probably a future solution will allow for an even better, lower cost “final solution”…

Because these casks would be very large and all look alike nobody would know what was in any one of them, which would be yet another level of security for the casks containing even higher levels of nuclear waste! An ideal outside coating for these casks would be similar to the spray-on “bed liner” used for pickup trucks that not only prevents rusting and or damage for the life of the vehicle but would also seal the casks to prevent leakage of any kind!

Hopefully these casts would be similar in size to a large shipping container so that existing material handling equipment could be used to load, unload and or move them about without “inventing” a mega hauler vehicle. By keeping the “footprint” of these casks similar to a large 40 foot container, the stacking and or placement of them might also be semi or fully automated which would not only save money but again keep the exact location of any specific cask secret! The monitoring of these casks 24/7/365 could even be done via satellite since these casks are similar in size to rocket launchers which are easily seen from space.

In another 50 to 100 years, storage technology will be such that, yet another lower cost solution for all this waste will be found, and then it can be considered verses continuing to using the above storage plan… Perhaps sometime In the future, a safe low cost solution like lifting it all into space via a space elevator* and then shoving it in an orbit that will send it into the SUN for final recycling will present itself…

BTW: Area 51 (which does not even exist officially) contains huge tracts of land that has already been used as a nuclear testing site (and is still contaminated and is now off limits to all but a few forever) would allow all this material to effectively disappear…

* The Space Elevator Project (LiftPort) http://liftport.com/ is something that the NRC should help fund ASAP, because it represents the best way to actually eliminate storing nuclear waste on Earth!